Cash is going away. This is what is being heavily signalled by all sections of the British—and global—elite. It is talked about as an inevitability, a natural outgrowth of the march of progress. In many city centres the cashless society is already a reality. The builder’s choice of chip wrapper The Sun did a survey of various high streets in Britain and found that in London 86% of stores did not accept cash already, with “the pandemic” sighted as a reason for the accelerated switch in this slightly anaemic puff piece. The nudge unit mob can give themselves a pat on the back.
The social control aspects of the cashless society and digital currencies are reasonably well explored—as are the links to digital ID, another supposed inevitability—but its seismic impact on crime has not been discussed at all. Save for laughable assertions that the cashless society will end all crime involving cash without replacing it with something else; something potentially worse.
Institutions can afford the measures required to make centralised digital financing secure. Individuals in many cases do not, or do not have the sufficient knowledge required to do so. Anyone can buy a safe, or rent a safety deposit box. Not everyone however knows how to use a “trusted” crypto platform, or manage a digital wallet.
Reuters reports that The Bank of England” will impose an initial 20,000 digital pound cap when the digital currency is rolled out. That is now a when not an if.
This would also appear to be a nod towards socialistic thinking about wealth hoarding or currency manipulation. It is however much more likely to be about managing risk as unproven digital assets will have teething problems that could see your entire balance disappear overnight.
Some hints of what shape this future financial crime might take are present in the crime treads during the lockdowns:
COVID-19 is being adopted broadly in social engineering approaches because it has widespread, generic appeal, and there is a genuine thirst for information on the subject that encourages users to take actions when they might otherwise have been circumspect.
City of London police have put out figures showing online shopping fraud spiked 42% over the lockdown period and “devious criminals taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic as a means to commit fraud, often honing in on people’s anxieties and the changes that have occurred to their daily lives.” The report admits large failings in catching and prosecuting often overseas fraudsters and demonstrates their pathetic inability to prevent a £34.5 million loss to individuals brought on by the instilling of blindfolded mass compliance.
Digital systems that replace cash have to be sold as high trust and low risk for them to be adopted, propaganda during the lockdowns left the public easy pray to fraudsters as they were bombarded with messaging about how much they needed to engage with, and trust, technology.
When the system’s reputation is contingent on infallibility, the individual will be blamed for its failings wherever possible. A worked example of this is a spate of gym robberies against women that all have the same MO: a phone and card is stolen from a locker in London and within minutes thousands of pounds worth of luxury goods can be purchased. The initial victims were accused by both banks and police of writing down or telling someone their pin code, until the pattern became so undeniable that there must be a flaw in the security system. A flaw being exploited that they where not willing to admit. It is likely these robberies are done with inside help either at the gyms or at the banks, this will continue to be the shape crime will take in a cashless society where high trust is placed in machines, and they are believed over people. A specifically digital anarcho-tyranny.
In a digital currency based economy, all money will be tied to your digital ID. This means identity fraud will become the most incentivised crime. Over lockdown it turns out bank fraud was down, but fraud against individual was up. Instead of being seen as a failure of digital infrastructure, instead further digital infrastructure has been posited as the solution to it:
“We urge the government to use the upcoming Online Safety Bill to ensure online platforms take action to protect customers by taking down scam adverts on search engines”
In a shocking turn, the architects of the emerging digital panopticon have proposed a bigger digital panopticon as the solution to its failings. Huzzah!
The largest failing of the digital fun bucks so far was the Corona Virus Loan Scheme and its mass abuse by fraudsters. This incurred an eye watering £16 billion in losses due to fraud and error, which amounts to roughly one fifth of all the corona recovery loans in total.
“As of 30 September 2021, businesses have drawn 1,637,804 facilities, totalling £77.44bn, through the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS), Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS) and Bounce Back Loan Scheme (BBLS). The three schemes were established by the government in early 2020 to support UK businesses that were losing revenue and seeing their cashflow disrupted as a result of the pandemic.” - British Business Bank
Attempts are not being made to recover this staggering loss of money, with £4.3 billion written off without investigation, with a possible further £20 billion of the loans in default to failing businesses. Its unclear what the overlap between the genuine defaults and naked fraud is, but this could be as much as £36 billion worth of UK funds lost out of £77 billion. This is what fraud looks like on a mass scale. A government directive of funding schemes to businesses being completely abused, by individuals likely foreign and untraceable. Imagine the fraud that will take place during a full scale rollout of digital currency across the entire UK.
Another great worked example of the abject failures of digital payment implementation from the UK postal service goes the other direction: massive miscarriages of justice due to software errors by the UK post office. A computer accounting system, called Horizon created false discrepancies in accounting due to poor designed, these spurious software errors alone were used in the mass conviction of UK Postmasters and Sub-postmasters over the course of twenty years in what is Britain’s largest miscarriage of justice. To quote:
“After some convicted SPMs successfully sued the Post Office, 555 convictions were declared unsafe and to have been obtained unlawfully. By 2022, 736 prosecutions had been identified, 83 convictions had been overturned and more were expected to be quashed. The number of those affected by other types of abuse by the Post Office, torts, breach of contract, coercion etc., has not been tabulated or published. The prosecutions, civil actions, and extortions resulted in criminal convictions, false confessions, imprisonments, defamation, loss of livelihood, bankruptcy, divorce, and suicide.”
Even as late as 2014 the Post Office were denying any wrongdoing:
“Second Sight's (forensic accountants) report of 2014 described the Horizon Computer System as not fit for purpose, whilst the Post Office stated that "there is absolutely no evidence of any systemic issues with the computer system". The Post Office terminated the Initial Complaint Review and Mediation Scheme in 2015 and published a report clearing themselves of any wrongdoing.”
The compensation remains unpaid or underpaid in many cases and this shameful chapter is British history is nowhere near resolved after almost twenty five years since the system’s implementation.
This is a computer payment system that involves only the post office, imagine a digital currency scheme by the UK government that effects every person in the UK having such problems and then subsequently being covered up in a similar manner. This type of mass injustice due to software error has happened, and will happen again, especially when the system must attain a high level of trust to function.
There are already foreign populations and interest groups in the UK that have shown a willingness to exploit the high trust nature of UK lending and financial services to fund terrorism. A notable aspect of the July 7th bombings in the UK is that they were funded by the use of bank fraud. Funds from which where then channelled to Pakistan for training, where the men could also flee:
“The group received detailed advice from a fraud expert about raising money fraudulently, selling cars bought on credit, lying about wages in loan applications, skimming credit cards, and obtaining and defaulting on bank loans.” - Intelligence and Security Committee Review of the Intelligence on the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005
This was in just 2005, and non-citizens residing in the UK live in even more of a extra-legal status allowing them free reign to commit crimes whilst robbing social security for all its worth. Knowing fair well that with no documentation they can claim to be an asylee, trafficking victim or modern slave, and have no end of human rights lawyers and charities running to their aid.
All consumption being centred around digital infrastructure, and a limited income/expenditure expressed as carbon credits, creates a financial prison for British citizens which would be inescapable once one has a British birth certificate and no other foreign passport. We already see organisations like Monzo and Revolut pushing bank accounts and financial services for 10-12 year old children, we can conclude from this that the regime wishes to get the digital shackles on us sooner, and to make them all the more restrictive.
Such a system puts us on the back foot indefinitely as the hosts (ala the Becoming a Minority framework) to migratory populations who arrive in the UK, who take all they can get from our systems and then move onto the next European nation like a swam of locust—leaving us to foot the bill. To put it more simply: criminals do not follow the law, when the law is enforced via digital currency and digital I.D. those who are able to side-step the system and retreat to a foreign land will be at a massive advantage whilst the static host population of the UK is ravaged with little recourse. Indeed, civil rights legislation both in the UK and USA makes it illegal to deny services to anyone based on their immigration status.
Let’s end on a piece of speculative fiction we feel encapsulates the issue at hand.
The year is 2033, it’s Boxing Day and you’ve saved up your carbon credits all year to get a turkey—a rare sight these days. The family is round, the snow is falling, the lights are on and the oven is whirring away… except it isn’t. The lights are dimming, the heating is grinding to a halt, the oven clicks off, tragedy. In a panic you phone the local CARBON CREDIT & ENERGY UNION, “What is the meaning of all this?!” you cry. A year of only eating soygrits and walking to work in the rain, only for your carbon credits to be stolen by a Somali family subletting a London council flat-come tandoori oven who have duplicated your ID that one time you scanned it to get on the tube two years ago.